A great diversity of devices and machines for carrying out the cutting of specific materials, such as plastics, paper, wood, glass, metal, rubber, fabric, meat, etc. are very well known and broadly used in the art, as well as some others especially designed for cutting certain specific waste products and many other materials that may be transformed and re-used for the manufacture of other types of products or simply re-used for carrying out minor repairs in products similar to them.
The extreme complexity of the problems encountered in disposing of or finding a practical usefulness to the large volumes of waste tires that day by day are generated by all types of transportation vehicles, as well as by defective manufacture of said tires, has caused the gradual saturation of the spaces designated for the storage of this type of waste products, inasmuch as due to the particular shape and bulkiness of the tires, the volumetric space required for their storage is very large.
It is important to point out that the problem represented by the disposal of the large amounts of waste tires is not a problem that may be easily solved by providing available spaces for the storage of the same, because this represents only the first stage of a rather complex disposal procedure in which the subsequent stages must be very carefully analyzed in order to permit the election of the most viable alternative which will actually achieve a clean and suitable disposal of this type of waste products, since due to the physical and chemical properties of the tires, mainly formed by vulcanized rubber, the disposal or transformation thereof is extremely complicated and consequently, it is usually necessary to have to resort to the traditional process of burning the tires to finally dispose of the same, which burning operation, as it is very well known, causes a high concentration of contaminating gases that are directly emitted to the atmosphere. This undesirably brings about an ecological damage which is of great importance and beyond any remedy, and also causes damage to the health of the inhabitants of towns and cities.
Disposal of waste tires by using the same as a filler material for the building industry, also causes serious draw-backs due to the relatively high resistance of the materials with which the tires are manufactured and the large volumetric space occupied by each one of them, which tend to leave a relatively large number of hollow spaces that introduce serious difficulties during the stage of compacting the soils in which said waste tires are used as a filler, without any possibility of achieving the desired efficiency due to said hollow spaces.
On the other hand, the great demand and variety of applications of the different elements of a tire at an industrial scale, including the tread portion of the tire, the side walls and the bead of the same, has brought about the necessity of optimizing the cutting or slicing procedures for a waste tire so that the pieces or elements thus obtained may constitute elements of high quality that may be used as a raw material in secondary processes for the manufacture of other products. However, up to the present day, no machine or device capable of carrying out the slicing or cutting of the different constituting parts of a waste tire in an efficient manner exists in the art.
An efficient waste tire slicing or cutting machine would also be highly useful for the mere immediate disposal of tires having manufacturing defects, because the display of defective new tires that are not acceptable to customers without the immediate destruction thereof, frequently causes the tampering of the display shelves by unauthorized persons that could sell these defective tires as first quality tires, with the consequent loss of prestige of the trademark involved.
It may be mentioned that a great variety of cutting machines for certain specific materials have been enabled for attempting to carry out the slicing operation of waste tires, but said operation has not been successful because it is difficult to carry out, it normally produces defective products, and the inappropriate design causes the cutting elements of said machines to have a tendency to suffer severe alterations as to their configuration and, although sometimes the desired objective is accomplished, this type of machines is limited to divide the tire into two sections, which results in absolutely disadvantageous and unsuitable machines for cutting this type of products, because if the cutting of a predetermined element of a waste tire is required, a second machine must be used for attempting to accomplish said purpose.
Consequently, it has been sought to overcome the inconveniences of this type of machines and to provide a waste tire slicing machine that, besides eliminating the above mentioned drawbacks, may offer substantial advantages with respect to the cutting machines and devices of the prior art.